Page 137 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“Let me go through this from the beginning,” I beseeched, feeling foggy and warm as I displayed a hand to count on my fingers. “The most common forms of baseline magic are levitation, restoration, destruction, transportation and transformation, enchantment…” With both hands in the air again, I trailed off with uncertainty.
“Summoning,” Morgoya added.
I lifted another finger.
“And vanishment,” Batre concluded.
Another finger.
“Right.” I nodded like my mind wasn’t swimming through muddy waters. “So there are eight, plus three forms of less common magic that include necromancy or healing, and then all of the mind-reading stuff.”
The High Lady clapped her hands gleefully. “You’ve got it!” she applauded, grinning as she crossed her legs.
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Hardly.”
“There is a whole new world of layers and rules that apply to all of those forms of magic, but we don’t need to get into them right now,” she assured me. “The most important thing is that you know what your options are so you don’t feel pressured to follow through with the only form of magic you’ve ever been shown—which was dark and kind of messy, no offence.”
“None taken.” I swayed a little on my feet, woozy. “I feel like this is a lot, though.”
“Here,” Batre offered, picking up the glass rose that Morgoya had transformed. She smiled as she approached me, but I saw the panic flaring in the depths of her eyes, like she was concerned they might lose my interest or scare me away. Like they’d be damned if they did. “You said that you’ve levitated in the past. Why don’t we see if you can do that again?”
Inhaling deeply through my mouth, I accepted the glass stem. It was cool and so devastatingly fragile between my fingertips, the distortion of the world through its translucent, ice-blue surface too pretty to be handled by someone who had touched so many horrors. Batre reclaimed my attention, pulling me from the intrusive thought, and I understood the look she was concealing. She’d pledged the commitment of her lifetime to Morgoya, who was irrevocably tied to Lucais in ways I still didn’t fully understand, and losing him would be catastrophic for the both of them—even if it was only in title.
Rulers in Faerie generally die at the end of their reign.
I straightened my spine. “What do I do with it?”
“First, imagine there is a link between you and the flower,” the earth faerie urged. “Picture it as an extension of yourself, the stem another part of your hand—a limb you can hold and control with calculated movements. Focus on that feeling, and let me know when you think you’ve got it.”
I did as she instructed.
The rest of the room faded from my mind; everything from the High Lady on the edge of her vine-woven seat to the maroon smudge of my hair in the mirror. The ceiling disappeared, and the floor fell away from under me. I stared at the glass rose until I knew exactly how many petals made up its flower, until the stem felt like a part of my hand, until I felt a sense of familiarity with the single leaf and thorn that peeked out from one side.Rolling it in my hand, the sharp angle of the thorn glinted as I turned it, and I could imagine my own blood running through it like a vein that would fill with the colour of my insides, a crimson flood linking my body to the flower—
“Apply pressure if there are any open wounds while you wait for someone to come, preferably with a clean bandage if you think you can find one. But the first thing you do is call us, even if you need to leave the house to do it, even if you think she really needs your help. Someone will always come if you call, Auralie. Okay? You did really well tonight.”
—and making us one. I squeezed my eyes closed, keeping the visual in the forefront of my mind as I gripped the glass stem and imagined that I could manipulate its movements the same way that I flexed my fingers.
There was a pressure in the air, an invisible thread stitching us together, as corporeal as the tendons in my hand or the muscles in my jaw. Opening my mouth to tell Batre—
The blood was everywhere, all over the floor and her clothes. The room was destroyed, our belongings strewn around the space like it had been ransacked, so many broken things I’d dropped without ever picking up. I heard a roaring in my head, shouts coming from all sides, but I couldn’t make out a single word of what they were saying or what was happening. The only thing I could hear was the wet, raspy breaths she was taking as she lay with her eyes closed on the living room floor. My hands trembled as I ran to her, stumbling over my own feet in my haste. The shaking was so violent it was in my teeth. Inside my own skull.
“Ma—mam—mama—” My tongue slipped between my molars as they slammed together and blood poured into my mouth. I fell to my knees at her side, hands hovering over her body, trying to find the wound. The nurse told me to apply pressure to open wounds. So where was the wound?
There was swelling in her face, but her nose had stopped bleeding. I touched it lightly, fingertips red and unsteady. Then the cut across her cheek. I forced my stiff limbs to work—forced them because they weren’t cooperating, they were barely attached to my body anymore, feeling like objects that I’d discarded on the ground and couldn’t pick up again—and moved her head from side to side, checking for an open wound.
Nothing.
I did the rounds like the paramedic showed me last time, hands following her body from her neck down to her swollen belly, which was scarred but otherwise clear from injury, to her legs and feet. There was nothing. Nothing that I could see caused all of the blood on the floor…
“N—n—n—no, no—no, no—no, no—”
“Aura, please, baby,” someone was saying.
Their hands were on my shoulders. Their hands felt more real on my body than my own hands did, so I decided to do the only thing I could and screamed at the top of my lungs. The person’s hands fell away from me, but my body started to jerk, and I couldn’t control it.
I moved one of her legs. That was where the blood was coming from—it was coming from between her legs. On shaky knees, I rose to stand, stumbling into the kitchen with blood-coated hands to find a clean bandage so I could stop the bleeding.
“She’s waking up!”
